thrash

I finally got off my duff and put in proper wiring (mostly!) for my headlights.

1) i found some 14-16 ga blue insulated female disconnects at rat shack. I cut and melted off the blue insulation. These fit inside the empty #2 pin on the B4 headlight connectors so that I could enable my city lights. They dont lock into place like the other pins in the b4 connector, but whatever.

2) i had a bunch of 10 and 12ga wire, and like 6 relays i found in a junkyard. Two of them appeared to have dual 87 terminals, so i built my harness assuming a 2-output pin relay. Oops. The relays had 87 and 87a. 87a is always hot (connected to 30, the powered input).

3) i didn't want to run new power cables all the way from the battery, so got 2 12" lengths of 10ga cable and put some ring terminals on one end, and attached these to the alternator post. nice and short, and i also have way more room on the drivers side than the pass side for wiring work

4) i figured i'd use a "local" ground in each of the b4 connectors, so put ring terminals on the end of the stock brown wires

5) on the drivers side b4 connector, i attached spade terminals to the stock wires in the connector. I wired these up to a relay and couldn't make light show up. Why? Oh! the ground isn't attached.

6) Turns out that i didn't see any suitable grounds nearby after checking with my meter. I could have maybe drilled the body but i didn't want to drill only to have it not be a good ground. So i ran a new 10ga black wire from the main body ground next to the battery case, around the back of the firewall and parallel to the hood release cable.

7) This mean that i also had to have a grounding solution for the pass side.

8) since i also will want to run relayed fog lights and relayed off-roading lights _eventually_, and i had a shiny new ground and a great local source to get plenty of power (alt terminal), I was going to build a ground bus. I had some 1/4" bar stock and i cut it down and then drilled + tapped some M5 and M6 holes in it. The m6 holes i used with ring terminals on my ground cable to the battery - so the ground cable terminates at this 2x3x.25 peice of steel bar, with a bolt that threads into an M6 hole (with a nut on the other side).

There are 2 additional holes on the ground place that are non threaded - these are so the plate can be zip tied into the mounting position.

The ground plate has an M5 hole that the drivers side b4 ground connector is screwed into (ring terminal). There are 2 additional spots left on the bar for M5 holes+terminals that will do nicely for additional lighting.

The last M6 hole on the ground plate is to run a 3rd wire over to the pass side, to supply grounds over there.

I had 12ga wire in white and yellow, and black wire in 10ga, all running across the facctory wiring channel in the bumper. The b4 connector's low and high beams were butt spliced and heat-shrinked onto the 12ga conductors. The black wire had a ring terminal on both ends. The brown wire from the b4 connector still had it's ring terminal.

In the future, i plan on putting in a 2nd ground-bus-bar on the pass side, and the 10ga ground will terminate on it. For now, the two ring terminals (b4 brown and 10ga) are screwed together with an M5 bolt, lockwasher, and nut.

Finally, to link the city lights with the stock turn signals, i used those cheesy splice connectors to jump the city light signal input on the b4 harness onto the turn parking light wire.

The other bad news is that i couldn't find relays with dual 87 pins. So i had to redo the terminals on the harness so that both sides had their connectors tied together at the spade connector.

Left to do:
1) Fuses on the 10ga power leads off the alternator. I was describing this to my wife and she was like "why didn't you put fuses on there? you're going to be pissed off if all your work melts because you were lazy".
Darn wife- i love it when she's right

2) I may disable the stock parking lights (amber) and have city-lights only. The parking lights are super ghetto

3) i want to do the diode mod so that i get high+low at the same time. However, i didn't want to put the diode in the power section, i think i'd like it closer to the light switch, running low current. I need to crack the light switch anyway to see how to get the euro parking light functionality (where you set the turn signal with the car off and the city light + tail light stay lit while the car is street parked overnite)

All in all, i am pretty pleased with the result. Final touches would mainly be fuse protection and weather proofing/ mounting the relays. They're just floating infront of the radiator. Anyone have advice on weather sealing them ? Maybe one of the fuse+relay panels that rallylights.com sells ?